This was a transformative period in English history. In 1783 the country was at one of the lowest points in its fortunes, having just lost its American colonies in warfare. By 1846 it was once more a great imperial nation, as well as the world's strongest power and dominant economy, having benefited from what has sometimes (if misleadingly) been called the 'first industrial revolution'. In the meantime it survived a decade of invasion fears, and emerged victorious from more than twenty yea...

The United Kingdom; Great Britain; the British Isles; the Home Nations: such a wealth of different names implies uncertainty and contention - and an ability to invent and adjust. In a year that sees a Scottish referendum on independence, Linda Colley analyses some of the forces that have unified Britain in the past.She examines the mythology of Britishness, and how far - and why - it has faded. She discusses the Acts of Union with Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and their limitations,...

In the century before the great famine of the late 1840s, the Irish people, and the poor especially, became increasingly dependent on the potato for their food. So when potato blight struck, causing the tubers to rot in the ground, they suffered a grievous loss. Thus began a catastrophe in which approximately one million people lost their lives and many more left Ireland for North America, changing the country forever. During and after this terrible human crisis, the Briti...

Now a major documentary film starring Billy BraggIn the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the British Government banished their political enemies - viewed with the same alarm as today's 'terrorists' - to the shores of Australia. Sent as convicts to the other side of the world, these political prisoners included liberals, democrats and republicans; machine breakers, food rioters, trade unionists and Chartists; radical journalists and intellectuals; Irish revolutionaries, Scot...

First published as part of the best-selling The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, Christopher Harvie and Colin Matthew's Very Short Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Britain is a sharp but subtle account of remarkable economic and social change and an even more remarkable political stability. Britain in 1789 was overwhelmingly rural, agrarian, multilingual, and almost half Celtic. By 1914, when it faced its greatest test since the defeat of Napoleon, it was largely ...

First published as part of the best-selling The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, John Morrill's Very Short Introduction to Stuart Britain sets the Revolution into its political, religious, social, economic, intellectual, and cultural contexts. It thus seeks to integrate what most other surveys pull apart. It gives a graphic account of the effects of a century-long period during which population was growing inexorably and faster than both the food supply and the empl...

From medieval Runnymede to twentieth-century Jarrow, from King Alfred to George Orwell by way of John Lilburne and Mary Wollstonecraft, a rich and colourful thread of radicalism runs through a thousand years of British history. In this fascinating study, Edward Vallance traces a national tendency towards revolution, irreverence and reform wherever it surfaces and in all its variety. He unveils the British people who fought and died for religious freedom, universal suffrage, justice and lib...

Adam Smith is celebrated all over the world as the author of The Wealth of Nations and the founder of modern economics. A few of his ideas - that of the 'Invisible Hand' of the market and that 'It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest' - have become icons of the modern world. Yet Smith saw himself primarily as a philosopher rather than an economist, and would never have predicted ...

Between 1912 and 1925, Ireland convulsed with political and revolutionary upheaval in pursuit of self-government. Canadians of Irish descent, both Catholic and Protestant, diligently followed these conflicts, and many became actively involved in the dramatic events overseas.Irish Canadian Conflict and the Struggle for Irish Independence tells the unique story of how Irish Canadians identified with their ancestral homeland during this revolutionary era. Drawing on ethnic we...

George Parkin was born the thirteenth child of an immigrant New Brunswick farmer and died a knight of the realm and perhaps the most famous Canadian in the world.Charismatic, charming, eloquent and dedicated, Parkin devoted his immense energy to two causes. As an orator and journalist, he worked to strengthen the bonds between the English-speaking peoples; as Principal of Upper Canada College and Founding Secretary of the Rhodes Scholarships he promoted a vision of education primar...

An accessible and innovative look at Irish history by some of today's most exciting historians of IrelandThis book brings together some of today's most exciting scholars of Irish history to chart the pivotal events in the history of modern Ireland while providing fresh perspectives on topics ranging from colonialism and nationalism to political violence, famine, emigration, and feminism.The Princeton History of Modern Ireland takes readers from the...